Critics, like politicians, sometimes find themselves alone against the pack, convinced that the majority is wrong.

Bitter Wheat
Garrick Theatre, London

Critics, like politicians, sometimes find themselves alone against the pack, convinced that the majority is wrong. For 72 hours after the world premiere in London of David Mamet’s Bitter Wheat – with John Malkovich as Barney Fein, clearly based on the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein – I seemed to be the only reviewer prepared to defend the show, with even the more habitually generous critics awarding only two stars out of five.
The weekend brought some crowd cover – the Sunday Times dispensing four asterisks, the Mail on Sunday five – but this column still remains what the Supreme Court calls a dissenting minority opinion.

Let me stress that I am not defending Weinstein, who is alleged to have demanded sex acts in exchange for casting or employing women. (He denies any criminal behaviour.) What I am upholding is the right of Mamet and Malkovich to dramatise the character.

Aware that the dramatist’s earlier plays include a comedy about movie tycoons (Speed-the-Plow) and a tragedy about aggressive feminism (Oleanna), some critics indict him of combining the two in a misogynist defence of Hollywood patriarchy. A further objection has been that the female characters – Sondra, Fein’s assistant, and Yung Kim Li, a Korean actress he assaults – are minor characters, the play being essentially an intermittently-interrupted Malkovich monologue.

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